This is a seven-and-one-half year demonstration program aimed at dramatically increasing employment, earnings and job retention among the working-age residents of family housing developments, a large percentage of whom are on public welfare (70 percent in inner-city areas) or at risk of dependency. It supports the planning, development, implementation and evaluation of locally-based approaches to providing saturation-level employment opportunities and supportive services. This comprehensive community initiative incorporates a combination of state-of-the-art employment, training and supportive services; financial and other incentives (occasioned by the welfare reform and new public housing policies); and vigorous efforts to rebuild and strengthen the community in support of work.

The evaluation design combines experimental and quasi-experimental methods for studying the effectiveness of a place-based comprehensive social intervention utilizing randomly-selected sets of treatment and comparison sites. The study will employ administrative records data as well as survey data covering a wide variety of outcomes to help examine whether the program's impacts vary across sites and whether certain program strategies are likely to yield better results. The evaluation will include comprehensive cost and benefit-cost analyses.

Number in sample and sampling method not reported.